The arcane soldier is actually quite good with a few changes and in the base game almost overpowered. Flame and Frost strike are bugged beyond belief, but it actually works in the class's favour and makes them very strong rather than weak. Just level your weapon skill with each level up and get a "hidden" level of flame/frost strike with it for free. Boring and technically bugusing, but very effective.

Flame strike does 1.5 fire damage per level... at level 30 that is 45 fire damage... every turn the enemy takes. And you just keep stacking it up until there is burn in the hundreds on your enemy. AS are boss-killers. 45 burn... compare that to powerful strike or bleeding strike, and the AS doesn't even have to invest skill points into it and can cast it for low power cost. Utter madness.

As an elemental damage dealer AS rip their enemies to shreds, in the base game they could kill a single enemy by themself faster than the rest of your party combined a second enemy. In my mod I needed to reduce their elemental strikes, and my AS still tops damage charts.

The main issue with the class is that the bugged scaling of their elemental strikes is very counter intuitive and just plain boring. In the base game AS just don't have anything to put their skill points in because all they really need is level 1 flame/frost strike and level 30 weapon skill. Their strikes are so powerful they don't need to learn any spells either, in the base game the strikes do more damage than a fireball. Unless you really ramp up enemy strength you don't need defensive talents either.

Before we got modding tools I stopped playing every party with an AS in it around level 20-30 because I had something like 40 unused skillpoints piled up and the class was getting too bland to develop.

In my oppinion the strike skills are powerful and unique as they are. The bug makes them much stronger than they'd already be if working as intended. Where the AS is lacking is everything else. They need a few useful spells that are worth lerning just so you can invest your skillpoints into something more than the weapon skill.

Huh, didn't really think of it in that regard. They really are a hidden powerhouse, just not really utilized as much as they should be, which in turn ends up making them boring and unitneresting to play.

Exactly. The bugged elemental strike progression doesn't make them weak, it just makes them boring to play.

It's a lot more than 45. If it's only getting 1.5 per weapon rank it's obviously getting a substantial bonus from something else. Otherwise it wouldn't do literally 50-100 at level 20.

The main problem is that's literally the only thing they do. Mage spells are underpowered at the levels Mages first get them, add delayed progression as well and they're just useless outside of utility skills (which AS generally does NOT get). That leaves them as a weaker Soldier in a game that requires focus on a per character level and would normally make them one of the weaker classes (and everyone not familiar with this mechanic still thinks they are). The warrior mage archetype in general is normally either worse at both, better at both, or does the whole spells channeled through weapon thing (Flame and Frost Strike are kind of this, and their unique mechanics single handedly save the class from the same fate as Divine Summoner and its jack of all trades in a system that doesn't support this).

If it weren't for me most people here wouldn't even know how AS works, yet I haven't banged on it enough that I could find a solution.

*shrug* 1.5 damage per level is straight out of the unmodified gamefiles and that matches my experience. Damage spread is probably around 30-60 burn per hit and all enemies with negative fire resistance have at the most -25%... which would leave your maximum attainable flame damage at around 40-80 with weapon skill of 30. Again, that matches my own experience, I've never seen flame damage higher than 80 on a AS, even beyond level 40.

I actually have a test party at hand, level 18 with appropriate equipment and that one does about 30 flame damage to regular soldiers (neglectable fire resistance)

Back when I was trying to figure out how exactly flame strike scales I had edited together an AS with 500 in all stats, weapon and weapon master at 30, character-level 40-something and that one didn't do more than 45 flame damage on average either.

Did you by any chance beef up the flame strike damage in your mod? If not You may have stumbled onto an additional bug concerning flame strike that lets you do so much damage.


Anyways, for me the solution was simple enough. I just revamped the mage spells to make them worth casting and eliminated the skill offset. The AS has, even in the base game, all the options to be interesting. If you wanted to you could always swing a sword and fling fireballs... only in the base game flinging fireballs was useless, so that part of diversity went down the toilet. With mage spells restored to usefulness the class is actually quite fun to play and very versatile in combat.

I'm gonna go in game right now, smack a few things and see what happens. It does have a wide variance (seems like 50-100%, most attacks are 75-100% or 75-125%).

Test character:

Level 20 AS.
Level 20 Swords.
Level 1 Flame Strike.

Attack 1: Hits Venom Wasp (resist 0) for 59 fire.
Attack 2: Hits Venom Wasp for 53 fire.
Attack 3: Hits Venom Wasp for 32 fire.
Attack 4: Hits Venom Wasp for 34 fire.
Attack 5: Hits Elite Weapon Master (resist 10) for 28 fire.
Attack 6: Hits Elite Weapon Master for 34 fire.

Strange. I do remember this doing a lot more damage. And I know I'm not misremembering, because I have video evidence of this character doing the same sort of damage at much lower levels. I'm guessing that like most physical attacks with an elemental effect it still goes through physical defense. That explains why the 115 defense Elite Weapon Masters take so little, and the irrelevant defense Venom Wasps usually take more. It doesn't explain why the high defense, -25 fire resist Odendros get hit for 100 (or why I seen similar numbers at lower levels with Frost Strike vs Gulfrins with their -25 cold resist).

Could be they patched something, but didn't fix the overall issue with the class being a one trick pony and how the damage is scalling currently.

It's possible, but have not seen any other patch since then.

Another possibility is just a display error with the output not separating physical from fire damage correcly. If one was to add the 40 physical damage an AS would do around level 20 with his weapon, the numbers match what you are reporting. It would also explain the lower damage numbers on the weapons master, as the physical damage would be reduced.

LoX is full of these display glitches, e.g. when using fireball on a group the main taget gets full initial damage and burn while the targets beside get half. Still the game displays the collateral targets getting the full burn, even though if you actually pay attention to how much health they loose it is only half the burn in reality.

I still think the most likely explanation is that you triggered a second, unrelated bug that caused the damage of your other characters to skyrocket. I honestly have never seen AS damage as high as you reported even before 2.0 and at much higher levels. The damage always scaled rather gradually towards 35-55 fire damage around level 30 and then just stopped. Sure the physical weapon damage improved afterwards with higher strength and better weapon but the fire damage remained as it was.

Mind you, that was a long time ago, I did not use an AS (not my favourite class in the unmodded game) up until months before 2.0 and afterwards I didn't get further than level 24 because I needed to restart so often to test things with my mod.

Even right now I'm levelling a test group up to verify my early game balancing and in this group my AS is level 8 and does a rather timid 8-12 fire damage (just the fire, not physical damage added in) on a non-resistant foe. it has been increasing steadily within the confines of what was specified in the game files and I expect it will keep doing so until level 30 and then remain static. Whatever causes your AS to do more damage apparently doesn't happen to me. I would guess whichever way I build my characters is different from yours and doesn't trigger this unexplained damage explosion.

It is not a display error. I am not showing the physical damage numbers (as those are based on weapon and strength and are being counted correctly), and the final damage numbers are accurate. For example, all those attacks on Venom Wasps were instant kills, even though the fire damage alone would not have been sufficient in most cases (and if you hit a very low life enemy with Flame Strike, it will show the physical damage number and then kill it without even showing a fire damage number).

Fireball is not a "display glitch". it is a skill with a range of 1. Any skill with a range of one hits the main target for full damage and cleaves targets adjacent within a range of 1 for half damage. Many large enemy melee attacks have this same mechanic. Contrast with attacks that hit "EnemyRow" or "EnemyColumn" that will do full damage against all targets. The burn damage on fire attacks is correlated with the direct fire damage.

Mine do about that much damage at level 4 so it's probably Sword skill or Agility or something like that.

The display glitch is the amount of burn on the cleave. When casting fireball it will show full burn on all 3 targets while the two cleaved targets actually only get half of the burn.

Something along the lines of: displaying 30 60 30 direct damage and 15 15 15 burn... while the direct damage is correct, the burn that actually happens is only 7 15 7 . Easily tested by casting fireball on a "clear" group of enemies and after it hit checking each target for how much burn is actually on them. The secondary targets only get half of what the initial hit displays on the screen.

Similar display glitches happen with other spells too. That has nothing to do with flame/frost strike itself, but it does highlight that damage numbers on screen aren't all that bug-free and perfectly reliable in general.

There is indeed a bug with cleave DoT damage. However when I say the damage numbers are accurate on Flame Strike I mean I am looking at the numbers, then checking how much life the target actually lost. And if it says something like 40 physical 60 fire, it actually did 100 damage.